Once upon a time, Catholics longed for and worked for the conversion of others, including a nation’s cultural elites. Now many of our Catholic leaders, intellectuals and academic institutions bend over backwards to assure the gatekeepers of culture and prestige that they’re just as right-thinking as they are.

For Haldane this results in “the displacement of Catholic faith and sacramental practice understood in terms of a rigorous theology of grace and salvation, and their substitution by good works, identified and sustained typically through emotive rhetoric, with an eye to seeking approbation or at least minimizing exposure to criticism from secular critics of religion.” It’s a kind of virtue-signaling.

So, is there any good news? Or should we just take “the Benedict Option” and head for a religious bomb-shelter in the mountains? I have two answers.

First, there’s quite a lot of good news. And second, Augustine is a much better model for our times and our work as pastors than Benedict.

Augustine stayed with his people. He loved them and fed them and led them like the great pastor he was, even while the Roman world fell apart and even with an army of barbarians at the gates. The Church in the United States is in vastly better shape than anything Augustine could have imagined, but his life is still a lesson. A good shepherd never leaves his sheep. He loves and defends his people, even when some of them don’t love him back.

As for the good news: The Church in the United States is doing exceptionally well.

From these comments, I don’t think the Archbishop understands the book at all. I doubt that he has read it.

As in decades past, only a minority of Catholic young adults attend Mass most or all Sundays (34 percent in the 1970s, 20 percent in the 2000s), pray daily (36 percent in the 80s, 45 percent now), and rate their religious affiliation as strong (26 percent in both the 1970s and the 2000s).

Disagreement with the Church’s most controversial moral teachings is also common: 33 percent of young Catholics consider abortion OK for any reason, 43 percent consider homosexual sex not wrong at all (one of few numbers that has changed markedly), and more than 90 percent reject the Church’s ban on premarital sex. As the authors conclude, “whatever religious decline that may have happened must have taken place before the 1970s,” most likely during the upheaval following the Second Vatican Council and the 1968 release of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical reiterating the Church’s longstanding ban on artificial birth control.

Since that time, Catholics’ religious practices and moral views have hardly differed from those of their non-Catholic peers. In other life outcomes, from mental health and family relationships to educational attainment and volunteer activities, the same story broadly applies. Today, even young adults who were raised unequivocally Catholic—as teens they had Catholic parents, attended Mass regularly, and self-identified as Catholic—say that you don’t need the Church to be religious (74 percent) and that it’s OK to pick and choose your beliefs (64 percent). They do not accept the Church as an authoritative teacher of Christian doctrine and do not consider the Church necessary to their spiritual lives at all: by baptism they are Catholic but by belief, they are effectively Protestant.

This is not a problem unique to Catholicism, but is rather general in American Christianity. I only bring it up here to say that the Archbishop has his head in the sand. He should read Christian Smith’s summary of his findings about the religious beliefs of American young people. And by my reckoning, his blaming American Catholic leaders for suppressing their convictions to curry favor with cultural elites is wide of the mark. Many of those leaders actually share the views of the cultural elites hostile to Catholic orthodoxy.

While I don’t kid myself that nothing has been lost from the pioneer generation, I believe this literal belief endures. Faithful Mormons believe that God is really real, and we are really his children, and he’s actually watching over us and expects us to follow his commandments.

And this is why I continue to be dismayed by ostensibly serious Christians who resist Dreher’s ideas so strongly. Is Christianity just a nice moral code to them? How can they be so sanguine when Christian faith is bombarded from every side? I look at the communities already living some form of the Benedict Option, and I see people who simply live as if they truly believe God sees them, cares whether they are faithful to Him, and intervenes directly in their lives. They do not see their lives as separate from the spiritual realm, but an integral part of it.

This realness of belief is scandalous to our modern world. Yes, He really died on a cross and came back to life. No, it’s not just a metaphor for bouncing back from a demotion at work. Yes, He’s still alive. I talk to Him everyday.

We cannot fear being weird. I suspect that what bothers Dreher’s Christian intellectual opponents the most is that he shatters their aspiration to be fully Christian and also fully normal and accepted.

Is Dreher being unnecessarily alarmist? Hardly. The collapse of faith among the millennials is well known. Here in Britain, church attendance figures are in freefall. He is also right to challenge how we fail to notice where the sexual revolution is leading. It has consequences that ramify into family law, school curricula, reproductive technology, the business world and politics. He worries that conservative Christians will find themselves shut out from jobs because they cannot sign up to this agenda. If you still doubt the need for alarm, consider the recent insouciant announcement about transgender rights here in the UK made by Justine Greening, Minister for Education (and Minister for Women and Inequalities). She wants to streamline the process of transition. Even before this there were reports of growing numbers of children, with support from social workers, telling their parents that they want medication to begin the transition process.

Look, if you want to understand what has happened to religion in the West, you would do well to read the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, an atheist (or perhaps agnostic) who has taken the full measure of materialism. He’s not always an easy read — not because his prose is difficult, but because at times he writes in cringing detail about the descent of his characters into sexual debauchery. Houellebecq is no pornographer, though. He is, as the French literature scholar Louis Betty writes in his highly readable study of Houllebecq’s religious vision, Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror. Betty writes that:

…Houellebecq’s novels represent a kind of fictional experiment in the death of God. And this experiment is best understood as a confrontation between two radically opposed domains: the materialism of modern science and the desire of transcendence and survival, which is best expressed in and through religion.

More:

The unbinding of humanity from God lies at the heart of the historical narrative the reader encounters in Houellebecq’s work: lacking a set of moral principles legitimated by a higher power and unable to find meaningful answers to existential questions, human beings descend into selfishness and narcissism and can only stymie their mortal terror by recourse to the carnal distractions of sexuality. Modern capitalism is the mode of social organization best suited to, and best suited to maintain, such a worldview. Materialism — that is, the limiting of all that is real to the physical, which rules out the existence of God, soul, and spirit and with them any transcendent meaning to human life — thus produces and environment in which consumption becomes the norm. such is the historical narrative that Houellebecq’s fiction enacts, with modern economic liberalism emerging as the last, devastating consequence of humanity’s despiritualization.

“Materialist horror” is the term most appropriate to describe this worldview, for what readers discover throughout Houellebecq’s fiction are societies and persons in which the terminal social and psychological consequences of materialism are being played out. It is little wonder, then, that these texts are so often apocalyptic in tone.

Here is a vital quote from Betty’s book — vital, that is, to understanding The Benedict Option:

Houellebecq’s novels suggest that once religion becomes definable as religion that is, once its symbols no longer address themselves to society at large as representative of discipline and moral authority, but rather address only the individual as motivators of religious “moods and motivations” — it is already doomed. Religion must do more than provide a space for the individual to enter, à la [anthropologist Clifford] Geertz, into the “religious perspective.” This is simply not enough for modern people; the symbols therein are too weak, too uncoupled from ordinary existence to give serious motivation. Religion must set a disciplinary canopy over the head of humankind, must order its acts and its moral commitments, must furnish ultimate explanations capable of determining the remainder of social life; otherwise, religion loses itself in the morass of competing perspectives (scientific, commonsense, political, etc.) This is precisely what has happened in the West… .

What he’s saying is that when one’s faith becomes an add-on to one’s life, as opposed to the ground of one’s life, then it is doomed. From The Benedict Option:

For the traditional Christian, establishing internal order is not mere discipline, nor is it simply an act of will. Rather, it is what theologian Romano Guardini called man’s efforts to “regain his right relation to the truth of things, to the demands of his own deepest self, and finally to God.” This means the discovery of the order, the logos, that God has written into the nature of Creation and seeking to live in harmony with it. It also implies the realization of natural limits within Creation’s givenness, as opposed to believing that nature is something we can deny or refute, according to our own desires. Finally, it means disciplining one’s life to live a life to glorify God and help others.

Order is not simply a matter of law and its enforcement. In the classical Christian view, the law itself depends on a deeper conception of order, an idea of the way ultimate reality is constructed. This order may be unseen, but it is believed and internalized by those living within a community that professes it. The point of life, for individual persons, for the church, and for the state, is to pursue harmony with that transcendent, eternal order.

To order the world rightly as Christians requires regarding all things as pointing to Christ. Chapter 19 of the Rule offers a succinct example of the connection between a disciplinary teaching and the unseen order. In it, Benedict instructs his monks to keep their minds focused on the presence of God and His Angels when they are engaged in chanting the Divine Office, called the opus Dei or “work of God.”

“We believe that the divine presence is everywhere, and that ‘the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and the evil in every place” (Proverbs 15:3),” writes Benedict. “But we should believe this especially without any doubt when we are assisting at the Work of God.” He concludes with an admonition to remember that when they pray the Psalms together, they are standing before God and must pray “in such a way that our mind may be in harmony with our voice.”

Every monk’s life, and all his labors, must be directed to the service of God. The Rule teaches that God must be the beginning and the end of all our actions. To bound our spiritual passion by the rhythm of daily life and its disciplines, and to do so with others in our family and in our community, is to build a strong foundation of faith, within which one can become fully human and fully Christian.

You can’t do this well by yourself. You need a community of believers who share the same radical commitment to religion. And you need not just orthodox beliefs, but practices that make those beliefs real in daily life.

This is what the Benedictine monks do. As I write in the book, the rest of us are living in the world. We are not called to be cloistered monks. But if we don’t make God absolutely central to our entire lives, and order every part of it to Him, and if we don’t do that in community — our faith is doomed. It cannot withstand the disintegrating forces of materialist modernity.

The Archbishop of Glasgow was speaking to American priests. The Benedict Option doesn’t urge them to get out of dodge and leave their parishioners behind. That’s absurd. What it does is to urge them to go back into the roots of Christian tradition, especially in reviving practices — both collectively, in the parish, and in the lives of the parish’s families — that weave the truth and the experience of God into everyday life. That, and teach the truth. And, teach the flocks why Christians are different from the world today, and why we must be “weird” by the world’s standards if we are to be faithful. Tell stories of the saints and martyrs. Fast in season, and feast in season.

In short: help the people in your spiritual care to see that the sacred canopy has collapsed, and that they must work together to rebuild it — or face the end of Christianity in their descendants. This is not a normal time, and we don’t need empty pep talks from religious professionals who have demonstrably failed to rise to the existential challenge of this post-Christian era.

There is a reason why the Monks of Norcia look at their ruined basilica as a symbol of Christianity in the West. Think about it. And yet … they have hope! Where does that come from? How do they find the strength to withstand it all? There’s wisdom in their tradition — wisdom that every lay Christian can profit from.

Re: Faithful Mormons believe that God is really real, and we are really his children, and he’s actually watching over us and expects us to follow his commandments.

Unfortunately this is connected to a heretical belief that God is a physical/material being, rather like the ancient Pagan gods were conceived to be before the philosophers spiritualized them in later times.

And Houellebecq embraces a more subtle and dangerous heresy (hardly surprising for an atheist!) He views religion only in instrumental terms, and something good for society. He wants people to believe a gigantic lie (since it is a lie in his view) because it’s good for them, or at least good for someone. How is this not the Grand Inquisitor for our times?

[NFR: Of course we Orthodox Christians regard Mormons as holding heretical beliefs. They consider us to be heretical too. That’s beside the point. The point is that for whatever reasons, Mormons are doing a far, far better job at catechizing and holding on to their young. MC offered one reason. Secondly, I’m not sure that it’s accurate to say that Houellebecq is guilty of heresy. He’s following Auguste Comte, whose views on religion were sociological. Religion undeniably has a sociological aspect to it. Houellebecq doesn’t believe religion is true, but he does recognize the social effects of religious belief. It would be wrong for him to affirm what he believed to be untrue, just because it “works” in some sense. But he’s not wrong for observing the social effects of religious belief. — RD]

Sounds pretty totalitarian to me. And sentences like this:
“The point of life, for individual persons, for the church, and for the state, is to pursue harmony with that transcendent, eternal order.”
could easily be interpreted as calling for some kind of theocracy (what does it mean that even the state “is to pursue harmony” with a transcendent order?).
And I suppose Houllebecq will now become some kind of Nietzsche figure, the kind of atheist theists like to point to, as confirmation of where secularism supposedly leads to?

Hmmm. Well, the Benedictines are still around, but how is that North African church in Hippo Regius doing? This is not a criticism of Augustine as a saint, but rather a comparison of the structures he and Benedict created and how they served to perpetuate the faith, but he operated in a system created by the Roman Church for the Roman empire and he died during a siege by the Arian Vandals. Hippo Regius fell to the Arians. It was a diocese that was essentially at the mercy of its rulers at the time. Benedict, on the other hand, created a robust monastic system that was relatively undemanding and easy to practice as well as engaged with the surrounding local communities. Choose your historical models carefully. Augustine’s lasting contribution was his own personal example and his scholasticism, but he left no guiding system for teaching people to live a Christian life in community. That was Benedict’s contribution to the West.

I wouldn’t put too much stock in statistics regarding Mormons. Getting accurate statistics on the LDS church is very hard and self reporting by the LDS church has its own share of problems. For example, the website cumorah.com (run by a faithful Mormon) has pointed this out for years. As a quick overview of the reasons to be skeptical about LDS statistics this page on that website is a good overview:

The two main problems I have seen are the following. First, there is a large language gap. What LDS report and what non-LDS think is being reported are very different things. Second, LDS statistics tend to look rosier than they are for the simple fact that LDS tend to stop self-identifying as LDS once they are no longer “active” in the LDS church. Contrast that with Catholics who continue to identify as such for generations even if nobody in the family ever shows up.

First, the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow simply proves once again that 1. people DO judge a book by its cover, and 2. if you don’t want people to think your movement represents a retreat from the world, you probably shouldn’t name it after a monk who, in fact, retreated from the world.

As for the condition of US Catholicism, Smith’s stats on young people can be read in more than one way. For instance, Sunday Mass attendance may be going down (from 34% to 20% over 40-some years), but “strong” religious self-identity is holding steady at 26%, and daily prayer rates are actually up (to 45% from 36% some 30 years ago). Those numbers more or less correspond with the most recent stats from Pew showing religious affiliation rates going down across the board, especially among this age group, yet belief in God and an afterlife holding fairly steady, definitely at higher rates than in Europe. The key to why this is happening, then, seems to be the same factor explaining all loosening of ties that’s been happening of late between individuals and other human institutions, including the much-maligned “government” and others that require some form of commitment, from unions to civic organizations — namely, a growing distrust of all institutional authority and a preference to go it alone. This “independent spirit” or cowboy individualism has really been part and parcel of “Americanism” from Day One.

Instead of looking toward Europe to explain this trend as it relates to the churches, it might be wiser to look closer to home at the ideal of *assimilation* so many urge on every wave of immigrants we welcome in. Be careful what you wish for, even as a nation, the outcome might not be what you hope.

Scottish Catholics have had a rough time for the past 500 years or so, but there is some good news from Scotland:
“Pilgrims celebrated Mass in the Old Rite after sixty miles on foot with a relic of St Andrew

A sung Tridentine Mass was held in the ruins of the Cathedral of St Andrew Monday evening as part of a new 60-mile pilgrimage celebrating the saint.

Bishop Tartaglia is quite the romantic, but is also hopelessly incorrect in both his understanding of the Benedict Option, and also the situation of the late Roman Empire as opposed to the modern Western world. The Western Empire did not collapse under the weight of repeated barbarian invasions, but instead fell apart because of the instability and incompetence of late Imperial governance. The barbarians, generally speaking, occupied lands where Roman authority no longer effectively function. The bones of the early Middle Ages were the holdover of the old Roman system of governance in many places, to where various practices and aspects of either era would be equally at home in the other. It would be incorrect to say that there were no conflicts of the faith, but the barbarians basically did not carry a well-formed and militant ideology with them as they migrated.

What we’re instead facing in the West is a complete collapse of rational thought, the assignment and understanding of meaning, the rejection of any kind of cultural roots, and so on. It is, in essence, if a great many people chose to give themselves a mental lobotomy and simply begin thinking that if they believe something hard enough, it is so. We’re not dealing with what is a transitional time between political orders, but the fallout of the decision to remake reality in the same of our mental models through relativism and existentialism.

The Christian “bomb shelter in the hills” is an ugly and stupid straw man, too, and also ignores the choices made by religiously influenced conservatism to try to fight a philosophical battle using the tools of materialism and temporal politics. Instead, anyone who is an orthodox Christian is now faced with living in a culture which treats the faith as irrelevant at best, and hostility at worst, a culture which constantly tries to insinuate itself into sacred belief and thought under bromides such as “be tolerant,” “don’t judge/hate,” and so on.

The “New Evangelization” called for the laity to be the vehicle which to take the faith into the world. While admirable in intent, it falls flat on understanding the state of the culture as it exists now. It is a little like the World War I movies, where the poor bloody infantry is asked to charge over the top of the trench into the teeth of machinegun fire. There is a severe lack of understanding of what Christians trying to evangelize these days face, and a lack of communication on the part of hierarchy of how to face it, even if there is a sincere desire to evangelize.

While I know all this sounds pessimistic, I do not feel pessimistic about the future of the faith and the culture. Christians are beginning to wake up and understand that preserving the faith and Christian is not something left “for the other guy.” We are looking at our families and understanding that we are clearly on one side of the cultural divide while mainstream society is on the other, and that we need to differentiate ourselves, to make the faith the center of our lives. The fact we are talking about these things at all is going to start to give momentum to the movements which will keep and preserve the faith until it finds widespread fertile ground again.

And just to mention, locally we have an ambulance that’s re-purposed inside to hear confessions. The priest drives it around the parish so that people on their lunch breaks, in nursing homes, or waiting for the Mardi Gras parade can receive the Sacrament.
Similar idea to the bus in Scotland. I think they do something similar in Manchester as well.

I have a number of friends who are devout Mormons. They are some of the kindest folks I know. I believe that their intense focus on family is a key to their success. The Church of LDS is almost a communist organization in that everyone is expected to provide it with a significant portion of their wealth. In return, the Church is supposed to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to be successful in the community.

Couple that with their sense of exclusion and they kind of follow their own version of the Benedict Option.

One must never expect a Catholic Archbishop to understand much of anything, so this can hardly be a surprise. Otherwise all the negative reactions are very predictable and you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

This is rapidly evolving into a rather obtuse discussion for what is generally a politically-oriented website. That said, I think there will always be valid criticism of an “Option” based lifestyle based on a few unavoidable truths.
One is, of course, an inability to concisely identify “the Church.” The most logical definition would include the small, local Christian community with which one most closely identifies. If the tent gets a bit wider, including pretty much everyone who believes in eternal salvation, etc., you will address competing groups that sincerely believe one or the other are doomed to hell based on hagiographic idolatry and whatnot (as per previous comments about Mormons, etc).

Another problem is that the idea of which church one belongs to is a shifting proposition, prone to changes based on a variety of issues, doctrinal and personal. For this reason alone it seems that Option theory holds an odd, romantically medieval attraction particularly to those who crave some sort of moral and ethical imperative and have never experienced life within or on the edges of some sort of acknowledged “spiritual community.”
Those of us who have realize that, while the idea of such communities can be an enticing and comforting construct, it is still just that, a man-made construct designed to moderate interaction with “the world.” At best, they can become largely benign cultural artifacts that impart a sense of belonging and purpose. At worst, they are social experiments that can end very badly.

[NFR: I’m much more interested in culture, and cultural politics, than straight politics. — RD]

Living in SoCal I can attest that this is true as most Catholic Churches are heavily Latino. You can’t drive by one on Saturday afternoon without hitting a wedding party traffic.

But I thought Latino Immigration was EVIL!!!!!”
*************
I visited Northern CA a few yrs ago & found that true about the parishes there, also.
But I don’t believe you’d find many folk in these comment boxes who think Hispanic immigration “evil”.

Central to Houellebecq’s work is that overriding apocalyptic tone mentioned above. In a clinical way, he diagnoses the decline of Western civilization as the loss of its Christian core; to Houellebecq, Western civilization and Christianity are one and the same. He obviously would not subscribe to the Benedict Option, nor would he believe there’s any kind of option that the West (and, by extension, Christianity) can take to save itself at this point. While he is pointedly not religious, his work comments on the grand sweep of the history of Western civilization and how the West once had something great (namely, Christianity) but which, beginning with the Enlightenment and culminating in the violence, consumerism, & radical individualism of the 20th century, has gradually eroded away to nothing.

The West traces its achievements and cultural foundation to Christianity yet it has now forsaken Christianity without formulating a system that can take its place; indeed, nothing can fill the void that Christianity left behind and so the West staggers on toward its inevitable collapse. All the various philosophies and ideologies that have arisen over the centuries since Christianity first began to wither – humanism, capitalism, socialism – are merely emasculated, derivative forms of Christianity without its staying power since they are not bound to transcendent truth and do not command the sort of self-sacrifice and obedience of Christianity.

Given Houellebecq’s sociological perspective, rendered in a sort of cool, academic distance, the fall of the West is viewed within the larger context of the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history. There is an undeniable sense of loss, pain, & alienation in his novels but this is due primarily to the fact of living in the West at this time of its demise rather than due to its rejection of absolute Truth (though I do suspect that Houellebecq does feel a deep personal sense of loss in regards to Christianity, in spite of his avowed, mercurial atheism or agnosticism). The West cannot survive without Christianity as its core and foundation as other past civilizations died once they had lost their spiritual-cultural cores, and so we Westerners are left only with empty hedonistic distractions to numb our anguish and anxiety as we cope with nihilistic lives devoid of any essential meaning. Houellebecq does not offer any hope because, in his opinion, there is no hope. Christianity is dead never to be revived and the West is in its death throes without it. Perhaps, in the grand trajectory of history, some new civilization will flourish, but for now, for us, we drown our sorrows in alcohol and ease our pain with casual sex because we have lost something truly great and unique in the Christian West that will never again exist.

if we don’t make God absolutely central to our entire lives, and order every part of it to Him, and if we don’t do that in community — our faith is doomed. It cannot withstand the disintegrating forces of materialist modernity.

I think you are right, Rod. Thus I wonder what you might say to those of us who find ourselves unequally yoked to unbelieving spouses?

So much of your thought in The Benedict Option revolves around the believing family and the work of that family building up one another and their communities. The centrality of passing on the faith to children seems central to your argument.

Without the believing family united in the faith, can the Benedict option bear any fruit at all?

[NFR: I honestly don’t know. I suspect it could, provided the spouse supported raising the children in the faith. What do you think? — RD]

“This ‘independent spirit’ or cowboy individualism has really been part and parcel of ‘Americanism’ from Day One.”

Anne, even assuming what you say about “Americanism” is true (it sounds like essentializing nonsense to me), you still can’t explain a change (decreasing religious practice) with a supposed constant (unchanging, and very bad American “individualism”). If America has always been “individualist” then that constant state cannot explain any new trend.

I used to subscribe to that kind of easy apocalyptic, misanthropic nihilism I described above, which is why I devoured all of Houellebecq’s novels, until I realized that they only revealed half of the truth. Yes, the West is dying because it has abandoned Christianity but to stop there and wallow in nihilism and misery is to come to a conclusion prematurely. What I came to realize is that we don’t have to accept that any hope in finding absolute Truth and meaning is necessarily a dead-end. Christianity is only obsolete if we accept that conclusion and cease living the Christian life. Hope does exist but it’s not the saccharine, sunny hope we’re used to; it’s a difficult hope that depends on each of us to testify to the Truth. Perhaps, this is the sentiment that Houellebecq hopes to inspire, to awaken a renewed sense of responsibility and meaning in spite of the crippling malaise contemporary society is mired in. By enduring stories of moral degradation and despair, we may be able to realize and reconnect with what we have forgotten and disdained. Regardless of Houellebecq’s intentions, while I initially read his novels to masochistically relish in the bleakness they provide, I now owe Houellebecq a debt if gratitude for enabling me to see beyond the meaninglessness and decay of modernity and to rediscover the transformative effects of devoting one’s life to the Cross.

MC, the The Mormon contributor wrote:
“We cannot fear being weird. I suspect that what bothers Dreher’s Christian intellectual opponents the most is that he shatters their aspiration to be fully Christian and also fully normal and accepted.”

A thousand time YES to this comment.

Despite the clear teaching in James 4:4 (whoever wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God), far too many supposed Christians these days want to be Christian (on some level at least) but also have a strong desire both for the world, and to be held in high esteem by the world. As a former pastor of mine said: “We’re Christian, but we’re cool.” Which is why he’s a FORMER pastor of mine.

“Mormons are doing a far, far better job at catechizing and holding on to their young”

This is not true. They are doing a little better.

“In the 1970s and 80s, surveys showed that the church retained about 90 percent of its cradle members. But in the latest Pew Religious Landscape Survey, 36% of respondents raised LDS have abandoned their faith”

This is causing a different problem.

And most of those leaving are men. A 150 Mormon women for every 100 men doesn’t work in church that upholds marriage as the Godly ideal not just for this life, but also the next. Mormon theology teaches women their lives don’t really begin until they get married, and that everything else, including school, work, and faith, is preparatory. That a woman’s divinely ordained, primary—even sole—purpose for being on this earth is to bear and raise children.

I can’t see this getting any better. Unable to marry a faithful Mormon, a jack Mormon will make an acceptable second choice.

LDS pews may be filled with attendees, but they’re no less hypocritical then other religious folk when it comes to their church’s teachings on sexuality. A study in 2009 found that Utah ranked number one in terms of porn site subscriptions:

‘”Subscriptions are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative legislation on sexuality,” Edelman writes. In the 27 states where “defense of marriage” amendments have been adopted, there were 11 percent more porn subscribers than in other states, he reports. Use is higher also in states where more people agree with the statement “I never doubt the existence of God.”‘

So the more religiously conservative states (Mormon or otherwise) also have a higher demand for pornography.

The demand for pornography among Mormons is so great that the porn industry has begun catering specifically to their tastes:

So even in tightly knit Mormon communities, the sex drive finds a way. If groups of conservative Christians start forming Benedict Option enclaves, I doubt that this drive would be thwarted. Short of cutting off total access to the internet, cable TV, and convenience store magazines, defiance of traditional sexual doctrine will continue behind closed doors. And I would not be surprised if those communities that choose to cut themselves off from the influences of modernity (like Benedictine monasteries) end up opening their doors to far more dangerous forms of sexual deviancy than porn:

1 man for every 1.5 women – perhaps they might have to go back to a historic solution! (Sorry if this seems to make light of the problem, but I really do wonder if pro-polygamy arguments might move out of the fringe and back into the Mormon mainstream if the gap continues to grow. Do you see any sign of this?)

Maybe the archbishop is just indulging in intra-church factionalism: he likes Augustine better than Benedict, and that’s all he needs to know.

Despite the clear teaching in James 4:4 (whoever wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God)…

Well, most branches of Christianity, Protestant as well as Orthodox and Roman Catholic, built themselves up to great worldly heights by being friends of princes and agents of government. So institutionally, the church is a bit out of practice at NOT being a friend of the world…

As you may recall, Rod, I have Mormon kin, and I’ve made the point here before that the LDS seems to have created its own Benedict Option.
That said, I find MC’s claim somewhat dubious (though he was not quite relying on the theological point that I criticized). But sincere Christians also believe that God is real, the Creator and Lord of all, and yet also that He became incarnate and died for us. How is this not every bit as profound as anything the Mormons believe? Why should it not motivate us to love the Lord too?

As for social instrumentalism with religion, I have no more use for it than Christ did for the Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s work. Christ did not come to save civilization or culture– he came to save us as people. And indeed St. Benedict did not become what he did to save civilization either, but to find salvation. Maybe that’s what we should be focusing on, and leave the World’s fracases to those who think the world is all that matters– like the Pharisees of old, they can have their reward while we seek something better.

Again and again, I insist I won’t fight you on the statistics. But what I’m seeing in Central Gulf Coast Florida is mainline and RC churches thriving. Of course, the population is increasing like crazy too, but my personal experience comes from built-up middle-class neighborhoods.

Having said that, I can see a Catholic prelate misunderstanding you–your doom-and-gloom reputation precedes you–but why would any Catholic be against getting together with those of your own devout kind and converting the world through your example?

JonF’s comments on Mormons and their “physical” God reminded me (unfairly) of Scientology whose “physical” God apparently came from outer space. Officially, thanks to government regulations or Court decision, it is officially a “religion.” (And a booming one.)

I’ve never seen it mentioned here, but any comment about failing or thriving religions in the U. S. probably should take note of it, whether one happens to be a fan of Tom Cruse, John Travolta, or Lisa Marie Presley.

Also, when you compare church (or Mass) attendance rates today with the all-time highs of the postwar 1950s, they’re inevitably going to look discouraging to church people. But the fact is those rates were much lower 100 and 200 years ago, even in urban areas where distance wasn’t a problem. The fact is, even though Americans tend to picture our forebears as Puritans praying, most colonists were unchurched, so much so that America always appeared to the churches as “mission” country, from the wild days of the 18th and early 19th centuries down through the last major revivals of the 20th.

Roger Finke and Rod Stark did a study of American religious adherence from the 1850s through 2000 using stats from the various denominations, plus Atlas figures from 1776 to measure the history of religious affiation in America, which is interesting when charted out, as Claude Fischer does in “Made In America, the Book.” Those figures actually show a steady rise from a low of 17% in 1776 to 34% in 1850 to 59% in 1952, then up again to 62% in 1980, where it plateaued and held steady through 2000. If Pew is right, the percentage has dropped since then, but it’d have a long way to go to drop below 50%, where it was in 1906.

Of course, affiliation and churchgoing are two different things, but according to Pew, 51% of Americans now attend church services anywhere from monthly to several times a week, while 49% admit they rarely go. That’s not really indicative of either indifference to religion, much less unbelief, especially when you take into account the much higher percentages of those who count themselves as believers and pray on their own, an individualistic approach to God that’s been part of our heritage from colonial times when percentages of regular church attendance were abysmally low, possibly below 10 or 15%.

When all is said and done, American Christians remain the most churched and regularly attendant citizens in the modern industrialized world, a stat that hasn’t changed since we got there in the 1950s following the war that drained most of what was left of religious fervor in much of Western Europe and left Eastern Europe captive to the forces of “godless Communism,” a situation that remained until only 20 years ago. Still, percentages are relative, and it might do all Christians well to ponder the significance of archaeological stats that now estimate the percentage of attendance at Sunday Mass by ordinary Christian laymen in the 3rd- to 5th-century western Roman Empire (including Rome, Carthage and Alexandria) at less than 25%. Bishops such as Augustine of Hippo were no less demanding than modern Catholic hierarchs, but most of the faithful seem to have found more “traditional” ways to express their fervor, e.g., communinhg with the saints via regular feasts at the tombs of loved ones, services that featured wine and hymns. (See Ramsay MacMillen, “The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400.)

For some reason I continue to read many of your columns, Rod, mostly because you are a dominant voice in a prominent magazine. Seems like you keep insisting that there is no salvation save for conservative Christianity. Without this anchorage there is nothing but sex, materialism, dissolution etc.

Wish you would realize that great numbers among us atheists agree with your value judgments in many respects. We could be your allies if you would let us. Probably, at least 50 percent of people in the West are atheists, meaning that they don’t have any religion. It is necessary to mobilize these 50 percent if we are to have a healthy culture.

Of course, nonbelievers should undertake this mobilization on their own, and I am ashamed to admit that I see hardly any nonbeliever take up this gauntlet the way you do. It is nevertheless true that cultural integrity is hardly the province of Christianity only.

Rod quotes Betty: “Religion must set a disciplinary canopy over the head of humankind, must order its acts and its moral commitments, must furnish ultimate explanations capable of determining the remainder of social life”

Buddhism is able to accomplish this quite well–and provide not only a canopy, but ground under a person’s feet as well. Now I know Buddhism is heresy for Christians, but it is the best antidote to materialism that I have ever found.

Lastly, in reading the book excerpts Rod includes in his posts, I find many echoes of the Buddhist concept of taking refuge–specifically in taking refuge in the Sangha. But in a hyper-individualistic culture such as is found in America, championing community goes against the cultural priority of endlessly propping up a non-existent self. Consequently, Rod’s words are not just misunderstood, there is a strong imperative to misunderstand them in order to maintain the delusion.

[NFR: Thanks for this comment. Note that Prof. Betty is not defending Christianity per se; he is explaining Houellebecq’s viewpoint in terms of the sociology of religion. — RD]

Have there been any studies about Americans who dropped out of the Catholic Church primarily because of the scandals and how many of them found another type of church to regularly attend versus just stopping to go to any church whatsoever?

“I wouldn’t put too much stock in statistics regarding Mormons. Getting accurate statistics on the LDS church is very hard and self reporting by the LDS church has its own share of problems.”

The LDS church doesn’t really release statistics on retention and overall “activity” rates, and most people who discuss the church’s above average (it’s “low” only if you consider close to 100% retention the expectation) retention use other measures, such as Pew surveys and the like.

The fact is, even given the “low” retention rates discussed on cumorah (which is a good resource, as is their blog “LDS Church Growth” – http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/ – which shows slow but steady growth rates and improved retention is recent years, but also some problem areas), the Mormons do a better job at youth retention than most other Christion denominations.

There’s a reason that Kenda Creasy’s book “Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church” has a chapter called ‘Mormon Envy’ and it’s not because Creasy fell for the Church’s own official statistics.

I ride a bicycle to work-thank God for So Cal weather-on my 8 mile commute I pass four Catholic churches, two of them with well attended schools, and there are four more churches within a five mile radius of my home, ourselves and some people in our area prefer the Saturday mass because the Sunday masses are too crowded, of course I live in a heavily hispanic area with a sizable filipino population, so that may explain the situation.

Most mexicans I know don’t register in the parish, we just attend mass, buy candles, participate in the activities and drop money on the basket, so if The Church is only counting people registered with the parish, chances are that our numbers are grossly underestimated.

LDS pews may be filled with attendees, but they’re no less hypocritical then other religious folk when it comes to their church’s teachings on sexuality. A study in 2009 found that Utah ranked number one in terms of porn site subscriptions”
**************
Sounds more like weak fallen human nature to me.
I’ve noticed churches in areas that have high rates of alcohol abuse are the churches with the least tolerance for drinking. There’s a reason. They know their frailties.

I can’t identify one person my sphere of influence (including myself) that isn’t a “cultural Christian.” We go to church, say all the right things to the right people, but after we spend our hour a week “playing” church, we are right back to doing everything else, which is more important that anything coming out of the “church”. If anything, I see the “church” as more of a business to support “pastors” and “musicians” then I do anything else. It’s a place to put on a concert once a week, and to make people feel good about themselves as they relate to “god”, but they all know they are completely BS’ing their way through the whole endeavor on the way to bigger and better things the rest of the week.

If what I am describing above wasn’t true, then we wouldn’t have abortion on demand, and gay marriage acceptance so rapidly in our society. If our faith was truly grounded by more than 6% of “born again Christians” then our sin wouldn’t be so easily accepted, and the nuclear family wouldn’t be so quickly on it’s way to an easy death.

Put another way, do you know more people who have never been divorced, than not? And do you know more “single” people who haven’t cohabitated or engaged in coitus prior to marriage?

Again, I don’t even include myself in any conversation of the very small minority who can actually say that practice what they preach. My testimony before God is a complete joke. Which is to say that I am simply a cowardly product of my own environment. Peer pressure and my lack of conviction got me where I am today.